A Delay-tolerant MAC Protocol for Emergency Care in WBAN Considering Preemptive and Non-preemptive Methods

For facilitating pilgrims with no delay, quick and real-time emergency medical services at ritual sites a delay-tolerant Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for the IEEE 802.15.6 standard based Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has been proposed. Since MAC protocol is application-specific hence any particular MAC technique may not be appropriate for diverse applications. In this research work, we consider dealing with medical emergency traffics which is random, independent of each other and can be generated at any time. Moreover, emergency traffics must be transmitted ahead of normal medical data or emergency traffic with a lower severity level; because any delay in emergency data transmission may endanger patients’ life. The proposed MAC protocol is compared with both preemptive and non-preemptive methods. Where, a modified MAC superframe (SF) structure, minimum backoff period and minimum Contention Window (CWmin) for quick data access to the IEEE 802.15.6 standard based EAP channel are also considered. The proposed delay-tolerant MAC protocol has been experimented with and simulated by the Castalia simulator which is based on the OMNeT++ platform. The experimental results show that data transmission using the preemptive method works faster with reduced delay than that of the non-preemptive method. Furthermore, the delay metric of the proposed delay-tolerant MAC protocol is analyzed, calculated and compared with the current Traffic-aware TA-MAC protocol. Results demonstrate that delay is relatively low during emergency data transmission using the proposed MAC in WBANs environment.

@article{Masud2021,
  title     = {A Delay-tolerant MAC Protocol for Emergency Care in WBAN Considering Preemptive and Non-preemptive Methods},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {11},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Shah Murtaza Rashid Al Masud and Aloke Kumar Saha},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0121152},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0121152}
}